FORT WORTH, Texas ― "I am the old guy in the locker room now."

Luke Snyder wasn't joking when he said that. He wasn't even smiling. He was simply telling the truth.

At 30, he and best friend Brendon Clark, 32, and Brazilian veteran Guilherme Marchi, 30, are the elder statesmen of the Built Ford Tough Series.

"I'd like to think some of these young guys still consider me a threat to show up and whip 'em at any given moment," said Snyder, who added that it means the world to him to still show up and compete with riders in their early 20s.

They ought to consider the Missouri native a threat.

Two years ago he traveled to Las Vegas and outlasted the competition, in what PBR livestock director Cody Lambert called the toughest night in bull riding, when he won the Last Cowboy Standing.

"If you're just winning a check every now and then or you're down toward the bottom and you're just winning a check here and there, it's easy for this sport to become very repetitious and just like a job."

The event win, which was his first in three years, could be considered a career-defining moment for a guy who won the World Finals event title as a rookie 10 years earlier.

By 2011, a lot of folks had counted him out and didn't give him a chance to be a Top 10 contender, much less win the Last Cowboy Standing.

Snyder was never one to dwell on the negativity of the naysayers. Instead he not only set out to prove them wrong, but also prove to himself he is as good as he thought he was.

"I'm the first one to admit that for a couple years ― two, three, four years ― there were times it was getting to be a job for me," he explained. "I'd have a couple good weekends and then I'd feel good again, but then it got to be where it was almost like a job. You can't do that. You can't have that mindset. There were a couple times I needed to talk to my fiancé ― my wife now Jen (Manna) ― and we'd talk it over.

The burgeoning relationship fueled a new drive and motivation.

A year earlier he missed qualifying for the Iron Cowboy, which unceremoniously ended his streak of 275 consecutive BFTS events.

He still hadn't been cut ― but was flirting with the cutline ― and yet to sustain a serious injury that would result in missing any time, but he wasn't among the Top 24 riders. In fact, in 2010, he finished the year ranked 37th in the world standings.

For the first time, in his professional career, Snyder began to question what it would take to be among the elite.

At the time, he was living with his girlfriend and her sister in Los Angeles. The trio enrolled in a yoga class. That was the first step in a year-long process of re-establishing himself as a contender. Eating healthy was another step in the ongoing process.

By 2011, he had dropped roughly 10 pounds, but, more importantly, his body was leaner and his reflexes were greatly improved.

A noticeably lighter Snyder was able to make the countermoves needed to finish ride. In fact, since then, nine-time World Champion and PBR television commentator Ty Murray described Snyder as "cat-like."

"It was a decision I made that if I wanted to hang around and compete with these young guys, for one point in my career I had to start putting a lot more work into it," he explained, "just because of where my body was and my age. When you're 18, 19 you can bounce and you don't have to do that much. You just have to be very confident, but then as you get older you have to put in the physical work as well."

Snyder added, "Once you see that hard work come together like that and it pays off, to me, it couldn't be hammered in your head any harder."

He won a few rounds in the weeks leading up to the Last Cowboy Standing and had what he called "a few shining moments," but it paled in comparison to how the win bolstered his confidence.

In the last 15 events of the season, including the Last Cowboy Standing, he recorded nine Top 10 finishes, which was a career high. The 11 total Top 10s that year are three more than any other season in his career and the five Top 5 finishes is also a career best.

It not only turned his season around, but also made a profound impact on his career, legacy and how he'll be remembered when the time comes he does call it a career.

"If you're just winning a check every now and then or you're down toward the bottom and you're just winning a check here and there, it's easy for this sport to become very repetitious and just like a job," Snyder said. "Once you put the work into it and show up here expecting to win and then you start winning it becomes fun again and then you remember why we all started doing this in the first place."

The $216,000 he won at the 2011 event was the second highest single-day payout in PBR history and coupled with the $264,000 he won at the Thomas & Mack Center in 2001 along with all his other trips to the Finals the nearly $673,000 he's won in Las Vegas is more than a third of his $1.6 million in career earnings.

But what made that spring night in 2011 more special had little to do with money and everything to do with the caliber of bulls and the caliber of the competition.

"To be able to win that, at my age, when a lot of people may have counted me out, it was a release," Snyder said. "I knew I could do it. I went there to do it and when that became a reality I could have just jumped over the moon."

Follow Keith Ryan Cartwright on Twitter @PBR_KRC.